Tobacco use causes over 8 million deaths annually, with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) bearing most of the burden. In Botswana, tobacco use prevalence rose from 17.6% in 2017 to 22.2% in 2024. Despite this, tobacco control infrastructure remains limited. Tobacco Control Resource Centers (TCRCs) have been established to consolidate provider training, research, and dissemination of tobacco control resources. The World Health Organization (WHO) Centre for Tobacco Control in Africa (CTCA), a regional TCRC, has a cross-country mandate that could be further strengthened through complementary, country-specific support. We applied the Community Engagement Studio (CES) methodology to co-design of a Botswana-based TCRC-assessing acceptability, priorities, potential challenges, and implementation strategies. In July 2025, 12 stakeholders from the Botswana Smoking Abstinence Reinforcement Trial (BSMART), a NIH-funded study aimed at integrating smoking cessation interventions in HIV clinics, participated in a 2-hour CES. Stakeholders endorsed the need for a national TCRC, prioritizing provider training, dissemination, and cessation services. Sustainable financing emerged as a key challenge, prompting proposals for diversified funding models. We successfully conducted a CES to guide the co-design of a Botswana-based TCRC, illustrating the acceptability of a national TCRC and how CES can be leveraged to strengthen tobacco control infrastructure in Botswana.

COVID-19 has widened the existing digital divide, especially for people from socially and economically deprived communities. We describe a program evaluation using a community participatory approach to develop self-reported items of patient experience with technology inclusive of digital access and literacy. The feedback received from Community Advisory Boards and Community Engagement Studio members led to the evaluation and refinement of the individual items. The community-based participatory approach highlighted in our paper to develop these items could serve as a model for other screening tool development for enhancing equity and inclusiveness in clinical care and research.

Community engagement is considered essential to effectively translate research into practice and is increasingly recognized as a key to successful clinical trial recruitment. Challenges to engaging community stakeholders in research persist and new methods are needed to facilitate meaningful stakeholder involvement. The Community Engagement Studio (CE Studio), a consultative model, has been used at every stage of the research process. Best practices drawn from the model could inform other methods of engagement. Using a mixed-methods approach that included evaluation surveys, impact surveys and interviews, we assessed the CE Studio program. We analyzed data from 75 CE Studios; 65 researchers and 591 community members completed surveys and 10 researchers completed interviews. Surveys indicate that 100% of researchers would request a CE Studio in the future, and 99.3% of community members would participate in a CE Studio again. We identified 6 practices to enhance community engagement in clinical and translational research: early input, researcher coaching, researcher humility, balancing power, neutral facilitator, and preparation of community stakeholders. These best practices may enhance the quality of existing community engagement approaches and improve the effectiveness of translational researchers’ efforts to engage community stakeholders in their work.